By Travstar on

Gi Guys,

I have been looking at drupal for a community website I have been asked to do. It basically consists of the following:

- Its a website for a local cluster of 9 schools in Australia ranging from primary to secondary schools.
- consists on three main sections 1- main page (with site into and the teasers) 2- Articles 3 - Forum 4 - Survey section (will explain later)
- It is meant to be a central place for teachers, students, and the local community to share information, opinions etc regarding the schools in the cluster. It is mainly aimed at the teachers though.
- It essentially needs 5 user types: Administrators, Teachers, Students, Parents, and Cummunity Users.
- If teachers post 'articles' they only want other teachers to see (same goes for the teaser as well), they they can tick a box when posting - used for posting info on how to teach a particular subject, lesson plans etc..
- Teachers, parents and students must select what school they are from when signing up.
- All teachers in this country are given an '@edumail.vic.gov.au' e-mail address when employed, so authentication when signing up must be send to this address only - ensures that they are actually teachers.
- the teasers must state what school they are from, and display a school logo
- Forum posts (including a teaser of 'recent forum posts') must have an avatar of the same logo from their selected school.
- Administrator users can be teachers as well - but only a few teachers will be administrators.
- a special 'survey' section of the website is for the administrator and teacher section only. It s used as a way to gather stats about how the teachers think they are going teaching cetrain subjects. Students can also vote (with supervision of teacher - using their login for example) about how they theink their relationship with the teacher is going. ths data is to be collected by the principals to compare their results with other schools.

well, thats about it really. Sorry for the huge post and thanks for reading ths far!

My Question is:

Is this sort of thing (especially the dirrerent user types and access levels etc..) in the scope of that drupal can do?? or should i be looking elsewhere?

Will I need a great deal of php knowledge to be able to do these things with drupal? because im more of a designer than a programmer. PS: the type of layout i was looking for was THIS: http://www.solucija.com/templates/demo/Internet_Services/. I like the idea of the teasers on the right hand site with the school logos instead of the 'X'. Also imagine the 'related readings' section being 'latest forum posts' with school logos replacing the 'X'.

Your expert opinions on this would be greatly appreciated. i sure dont want to get 3/4 of the way through this using drupal then realise it cant do one of the things i want it to do!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

gmalcolm’s picture

gmalcolm commented

Hi Travstar

Starting with the last question first:

> Will I need a great deal of php knowledge to be able to do these things with drupal?
> because im more of a designer than a programmer.

Some php will always give greater flexibility when adapting drupal to your particular needs but much of what you describe would be feasible with various contributed modules

Picking out a few items from your list...

> - If teachers post 'articles' they only want other teachers to see (same goes for the teaser as well),
> they they can tick a box when posting - used for posting info on how to teach a particular subject, lesson plans etc..

Consider making this either a flexinode and use access control to enable read/write for only the "teacher" role or use the Taxonomy Access Control module

> Teachers, parents and students must select what school they are from when signing up.

Could be as straightforward as adding a drop down list to the profile... but may want to use taxonomy list, see below

> All teachers in this country are given an '@edumail.vic.gov.au' e-mail address when employed,
> so authentication when signing up must be send to this address only - ensures that they are actually teachers.

Check out account rules in access control.

> the teasers must state what school they are from, and display a school logo

Could be a taxonomy selection made when posting. If you wanted to tie this to details attached to their profile, you may need to do a little coding.

> Forum posts (including a teaser of 'recent forum posts') must have an avatar of the same logo from their selected school.

If using taxonomies as described above, could be part of your design.

> a special 'survey' section of the website is for the administrator and teacher section only.
> It's used as a way to gather stats about how the teachers think they are going teaching cetrain subjects.
> Students can also vote (with supervision of teacher - using their login for example) about how they theink
> their relationship with the teacher is going. ths data is to be collected by the principals to compare their
> results with other schools.

Check out the survey module

You'd probably do well to link up with some of the members of:

http://groups.drupal.org/australia

They might be available to consult on some of the trickier configuration and coding.

Cheers
Grant

Theatre Australia
http://theatre.asn.au/

Travstar’s picture

Travstar commented

Thanks gmalcolm.

It certainly gives me a direction to go in.

Travis

bonobo’s picture

bonobo commented

Drupal will do pretty much all of what you are looking for -- one of the questions to consider when planning out the site is how much interaction there will be between parents, students, and teachers -- as you describe it in your post, there will be interaction between teachers from different schools, but that teachers will want to have private communications among one another -- if this is the case, you might want to think about different sites for private teacher communications.

WRT organizing users into groups, you should definitely check out the Organic Groups module -- if you decide to build this entire site in Drupal, OG will help you organize your site members as you describe in your post.

You should also check out Elgg at http://elgg.net -- while, given the voting/surveying functionality you need, Drupal will probably align more precisely with your needs, it would be worth checking Elgg out to see another viable option.

Cheers,

Bill

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http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

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http://www.funnymonkey.com